Supporting or Contributing to M-Lab

M-Lab welcomes the participation of individuals researchers and ISPs, as well as companies, organizations, and other institutions that would like to help expand the platform and ensure its growth and success.

Note that all M-Lab usage and contributions are subject to M-Lab’s Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Policy. For any contribution of significant resources, it might be appropriate to draft a Memorandum of Understanding.

Develop a Test

Researchers developing and maintaining open source network measurement tests may apply to host a new test on M-Lab. If your project fits within M-Lab’s guidelines and principles, we invite you to email us about M-Lab hosting.

Please review these documents below before contacting us:

Use an M-Lab Test in Your Website or Application

M-Lab’s open source tests can be added to your website, mobile application, or other software, providing a service to your users and allowing M-Lab to reach more people and generate more data. The Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) has been used by a number of third party websites and application developers, including Google Search, Speedup America, Fing, and several others.

If you are considering building an M-Lab test into your website or application, you should be familiar with M-Lab’s Privacy and Acceptable Use policies.

You can find out more information in our Developers Guide and data documentation.

Host or Sponsor an M-Lab Measurement Site

It’s easier than ever to contribute to Measurement Lab’s platform. The process is almost entirely automated, allowing any reasonably modern, high-performance, and well-connected physical or virtual server to be added to M-Lab’s fleet. This will increase the platform’s resilience, diversity, and reach, supporting M-Lab’s mission.

All contributions are considered tax-deductible donations to Code for Science & Society, M-Lab’s nonprofit fiscal sponsor. To learn more, contact us at hello@measurementlab.net.

Host-Managed Deployment

This is the best way for small to medium sized ISPs or other organizations to contribute M-Lab servers. We are now accepting new host organizations in a second pilot phase.

To contribute servers:

M-Lab will provide successful applicants with an API key and other information necessary to build and configure measurement servers.

Jointly Managed Deployment

We are investigating a new deployment model where management of the machines is split between an organization and M-Lab in some way.

If this is a possibility for your organization, please get in touch with us at hello@measurementlab.net. We want to ensure any new deployment model is compatible with existing fleet orchestration technologies and would love to hear from you.

Cloud Credits for Virtual Servers

The easiest way to donate infrastructure to M-Lab is by providing cloud credits from major providers such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Equinix, Linode, IBM, etc.

On average, our fleet’s egress load (typically the most expensive cost) is about 100 Mb/s per server. However, our busiest servers can average almost 3 Gb/s. We can steer measurement traffic to limit the load on any individual server, allowing us to tune traffic to fit your budget.

This option is ideal for contributors who offer large-scale cloud services, but are not interested in co-managing their contribution to our fleet.

Hardware Deployment Managed by M-Lab

The current M-Lab physical fleet consists of bare metal servers with Dell’s iDRAC remote console and software fully managed by M-Lab. A minimal deployment would consist of one server with statically assigned, globally routed /28 or /29 IPv4 prefix and one /64 IPv6 prefix. The legacy full deployment (4 servers and a switch) is no longer necessary.

If you are interested in contributing hardware to the M-Lab platform we would be interested in piloting new server specifications. Please contact us at hello@measurementlab.net.

Interested?

Please fill out our online Infrastructure Contribution Form and feel free to reach out to hello@measurementlab.net.

Analyze and Visualize M-Lab Data

M-Lab welcomes researchers who want to dig into the M-Lab data, providing documentation and best-effort email support. If you are interested in working with M-Lab data in your research, please review our data documentation to help get you started, and contact us with any questions. We also suggest that you join our public mailing list for news and announcements. If you have experience in web or application development, data analysis, or visualization, you may be interested in working with M-Lab’s tests, data, and analysis tools, all of which are open source and openly licensed.

M-Lab welcomes the direct financial contributions of organizations that find our work beneficial. If your organization is interested in supporting the M-Lab platform, please review our sponsorship offerings and contact us.

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